Humanity is doomed because of America. Your anti-environmental capitalism and rapacious foreign policy have altered the world in an entirely negative way, and the only realistic scenario for the US to cut this shit out is by losing a war to a major competitor, such as China. China is hugely flawed itself, but is the less harmful option imo.
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tankie take
If that’s your takeaway, you’ve missed the point. Well done.
No it wasn’t. Overall points:
- something is needed to radically halt US destruction of the world. I can’t think of anything which will achieve this short of a lost war. China is, afaik, the only potential enemy capable of inflicting this loss on the US.
- i have no love but China (see my other comments in this thread), but objectively its existence has been less harmful to the rest of the world than that of the US.
Calling that a ‘tankie take’ is low effort shit which contributes nothing to the discussion. In any case, I’m pretty sure tankies are apologists for all the bad stuff China does, so not sure i fit into that category, babybus.
Whatever, dude, have a good one
Thanks! Happy New Year
China pollutes way more than the US though and are far less transparent about it.
No they don’t, what are you talking about?
I lived there for many years. Trust me, they do.
What does you living there have to do with it? They objectively don’t.
Everyday I was there I had to wear a mask and I developed asthma. Believe whatever you want.
They’re also modernizing faster than us. They’ll be green first.
They literally just built like 9 coal plants last year…
I’m not holding China up as some panacea, it’s very far from perfect (e.g. authoritarian security state, denial of Taiwanese independence, etc.), but i do think it does less net harm than the US. I would also suggest that the things we criticise China for are things which we would overlook in a country which was perceived as less of a threat to western dominance.
In any case, i was trying to say not that i want the US to be like China, but rather that i think the only way to prevent the US from killing us all is through a radical change of attitude, most likely caused by the loss of a major conflict.
The down votes are coming from inside the
housecountry!Haha, yes, i think so. Although it can’t be easy when it feels like the rest of the world (well, lemmy) is piling on to talk shit about your country
It also has about 4x the population, and doesn’t pollute 4x more.
Plus it’s still the largest manufacturing hub in the world. Europe would pollute a lot more if we hadn’t exported a lot of (some might say too much) of our industry to the developing world and China over the last 50 years.
Believe me there’s no shortage of people who know that were not the shining city on the hill, unfortunately we’re drowned out by pandering patriotic country music and gunfire from mass shootings.
What? We have two right wing parties to choose from! Is that not enough? Should we make three right wing parties so you feel we are better represented?
Yeah, most of us in the U.S. don’t think this way. This is just republicans, and they aren’t really here on Lemmy.
Then why do you sound like you are
Because thats what you’ve been brainwashed to think the world wants, so thats what you hear
lol
Many, if not most, of us are jealous of other countries, though. Really, this is only a hard truth for the MAGA crowd, and even that is (I think) largely the fault of the nationalist propaganda that’s been shoveled at us since we were kids.
As an American, I agree with you, though - the US is in no way a ‘strong democracy’, or much of a democracy at all. It may once have been, but it certainly hasn’t been the case for a long time.
Back in 1780s the US constitution was an absolute marvel of progressiveness, but today, it is increadibly outdated and keeps the US political system back from making progress.
We’re like the 40-year-old still wearing his school jacket and talking about winning state.
But we’re really a used car salesman trying to get you to finance a clapped out Nissan Altima with 128k miles, failing clear coat, and a dented bumper.
No shit, what American thinks either are true?
America, fuck yeah!
Has been a joke for like 30 years now
The irony is rooted in reality, much like the stereotypes.
I’ve received quite a few hostile reactions when critiquing the US, including idiocy like “FU we have a bigger military” from blowhards.
There are, unfortunately, enough bad apples to spoil the bushel.
You haven’t met much of the rural population, have you?
Literally the opposite…
Where are you see conservatives talking about how great America has been under Bidnen?
Like, you put zero thinking into your comment, just like you assume the people you’re “dunking on” do.
You’re a different side of the same coin, that’s never meant opposites, you’re th same thing.
Just neither sid bis smart enough to figure it out, and both think only the other side is dumb
This. Conservatives have poor media literacy. They don’t understand that they’re the punchline in stuff like that. They miss the point of stuff like RoboCop and Starship Troopers and unironically like those movies for the action and don’t even recognize the social commentary. They watched Team America and guffawed into their 24 packs of light beer at every shallow joke without recognizing that the jokes were intentionally shallow to point out what an idiot would think is a good joke. It’s like the TV show in Idiocracy. The real joke is below the surface.
I used to watch Colbert Report with my dad and it took him years to realize that it was a parody mocking him often personally. My dad was not a dumb man. The conservative bubble is hard to pop. Its like a Stockholm syndrome victim sympathizing with their attacker.
There are different dimensions of dumb.
It blows my mind that when Colbert got his new job he had people coming up to him for years saying they liked his old show better.
They liked his old show, The Colbert Report, better. When it was clearly satire.
His old show was better. But I can’t imagine it working well any more, when reality is already so absurd.
No they were conservative guys who clearly didn’t understand it was satire
This clip from the Newsroom sums it up perfectly.
Man I forgot how good that show was
I like the clip, but IMO they basically bailed out in the end by all the nonsense quoted from the ~3:25 mark on.
Jeff basically makes it sound like the US used to be incredibly self-aware, humble, kind, and well-administrated, but I think what most Americans don’t choose to understand is that since the very settling of the continent, it’s been a highly fraught, contentious situation, much of it characterised by greed, cruelty, violence, intolerance and self-righteousness.
Now yes, from what I understand of history, under FDR we more or less hit a peak of being a well-run, progressive country, on the level of many modern Euro countries more or less, but most of that was specifically in response to the utter disaster of the Great Depression and the need to adjust powerfully, swiftly and accurately. Meanwhile, IIRC during his presidency, there was in fact a right-wing movement intending to remove him by underhanded means.
So I like the hopefulness of the clip, but in the end I also find it pretty typical of Americans being largely unwilling to understand the hows and whys of the nation, going back to the early 1600’s.
Eh, sorry for the dang essay. :S
South Central and Caribbean duh
You may have heard about North America but that’s a hoax. Who would be gullible to believe there’s people who behave like USA’ians?
Canada is another hoax, it’s just the part of Greenland where people live.
America is not the World.
To expand on this.
Canadians are Americans. Mexicans are Americans. Peruvians are Americans. Yankees (or USofAvians) are Americans too. They’re just the only country with a self-appellation claiming to represent two whole continents worth of people (when most of them probably can’t name all the countries in America without a quick gander at google maps).
Your bi-Party system sux big d and I toxic to a real democracy
Capitalists hate competition
Yup we definitely already know this.
As an American. Hard agree. I long for a first past the post voting system reform
As an American, I’m gonna barge in with my loud opinion, 'cuz that’s what we do. Here’s something which people living elsewhere might not know that Americans aren’t ready to hear:
Automobiles are luxury toys and fashion accessories, and we shouldn’t base our entire lives on them. No, the car industry didn’t make our economy strong; it took off after we already had a lot of extra wealth to burn after becoming a world economic powerhouse. We can’t afford to keep wasting all that wealth on them as the world starts to burn, and half of our citizens sink into poverty.
Quite a few people buy cars just because they need to get places and there’s not good alternatives. Otherwise why would cars like the Sentra or CRV exist? Just making it so those folks don’t need to buy one would do a lot to make cars more luxurious and fashionable.
Those are fine examples to prove my point. Even the low-end, just-get-around cars have climate controls, entertainment systems, and plush seating. They’re about more than utility, just getting from one place to another. For the CRV, the web site for it really wants to sell the image of adventure, like driving one means you’re ready to head out on road trips, and listen to the Bose sound system while doing so. The base model is also 190hp. The Sentra is 149hp, and over $20,000 base price. Compare that to the Ford Model T, at around $6,000 (inflation adjusted). That was 20hp. Twenty horsepower, no air conditioning, no power steering, no Apple CarPlay, and people drove them across the continent.
Anyway, I just got home from some errands, and while out, I saw a guy driving a big, shiny, white Ford Model F truck, and wearing a cowboy hat. There are no cattle ranches in Wisconsin. Also, it’s January and he wasn’t wearing a coat; he doesn’t plan to go outside. The car one drives is totally a fashion statement. Driving a low-end car conveys a message about you, just like wearing off-the-rack versus bespoke clothes. Even Warren Buffett’s econobox is a statement.
And that’s leaving aside the assumption that getting from place to place has to involve a car.
People also used to sleep in houses made of sod with mud floors and wood fire heating. But we don’t now because that’s not very nice, despite it being incredibly energy intensive to light, heat, and cool a whole house and refrigerate parts of it and have thinking machines just to play games on.
I want cars to be luxurious and fashionable but not necessary. I think it will lead to cars that look and drive better, and fewer people on the roads will make driving more fun.
I’m with you on that last bit. The problem that we have with cars is the way that almost everybody is forced to use one for every trip to go anywhere, or at least forced to own a car for many trips. We can’t sustain that economically (I believe that car ownership is a financial burden for around 1/4 of Americans, and our infrastructure rates at D+ nationally), ecologically (climate change is only part of it, the direct ecological destruction is also enormous), and even psychologically (the loneliness epidemic). I’d be over-the-moon if everybody had a choice of a convenient alternative to a single-passenger car for any trip that they wanted to do, with cars as the luxury alternative.
I like how you cite cars which are fairly reasonable options when the Mitsubishi Mirage exists.
I have one of those! Its a manual!
I thought about getting one but then I watched the crash test of a pickup hitting the side and read that they have the most deaths is any vehicle.
I sorta feel like getting hit by a pickup in anything is a bad time but I will say it is a very small car and very light.
I was gonna mention it but thankfully it’s been discontinued
Ironically the ability to not have a car is also flex on wealth in the US because you would have to be able to afford to live and work in a region that is incredibly limited and expensive. In most of the US cars aren’t luxury toys, they’re a needed appliance and many employers will refuse to hire you without one.
That’s 100% due to government policy. Those places are highly desirable places to live as evidenced by the high prices, but they are limited in supply only because it’s illegal to build new ones. We used to build efficient places out of economical necessity, then for the usual reason (racism), we codified an extravagant, wasteful built environment as the default, or only, option.
Cars are still luxury toys, they’re just required by law.
Nowhere is a car required by law …lmfao
That’s not exactly true. While yes, the car isn’t required but there are zoning restrictions on density of housing and mixed use spaces making the car needed to accommodate.
I’m going to stipulate here that you don’t get to have it both ways, to say that a car is both essential to American life, but not required by law. See, it’s laws that shape the human environment to make one essential: Parking minimums, building codes, zoning, lending standards, driver’s licenses as default photo ID, and so on.
If it’s laws that make cars required to live, then they’re de facto required by law.
Okay, but they aren’t literally required by law. You’re just making a case for them being a necessity not everyone truly wants.
Plenty of people don’t own vehicles, and they are not getting in trouble with our legal system for simply making that choice.
Yes, but it’s a hair-splitting distinction that it’s not a law is not an individual mandate that each citizen own one. There are plenty of other laws that do literally require cars. For that matter, it’s required by law that we have Social Security Numbers, and that’s just a side note in a discussion about their role in our society.
They are also necessities, unless you have a very specific job in a large, or otherwise very specific city. Their adoption has created expectations, particularly amongst employers.
Necessities? How did humans survive for 200,000 years before their invention?
Tell me you live in a tiny country without telling me…lol
as an American
lol
Is this one of those canned arguments that Americans are programmed to pop out when somebody questions the car-based lifestyle? Okay, then, if the United States is so big, then shouldn’t we have room to build amenities closer to where people live, so we don’t need to drive everywhere for everything?
Seinfeld isn’t funny.
I’m British and I think it’s funny. Some of the more saccharine shows like US Office or Parks & Rec are not to my taste though.
That’s cuz British comedy is drier than ur mums teacakes.
The Office is another comedy series I don’t understand. When it’s not plain boring it’s just cringe.
Man if you think the office is cringe, stay away from Curb Your Enthusiasm. I think I like the show because it makes me feel like I know how to interact with people (I dont)
…that’s the joke
To put it in British terms, this is like hating Cats Does Countdown because they keep telling jokes instead of playing the game
I know. I’m saying it’s a bad, unfunny joke.
You mean Jerry or the show? Cause the show did have a great stretch of hilarity when new.
Jerry Seinfeld, the guy, isn’t a funny comedian. And his show, about himself, isn’t funny either.
Larry David, co-creator, head writer and EP for seven seasons, is funny. The character of George is a stand-in for Larry and if you watch with that in mind it becomes more apparent that Jerry is essentially playing “the straight man” to his funnier cast mates. Which is great because as you mention, Jerry’s not very funny or relatable and comes across as a pompous dick most of the time.
Au contraire.
The show wasn’t about Jerry Seinfeld and this comment showed us your lack of understanding.
The show often, and the cast itself, they found comedy in the mundane, the coincidences, the awkward situations we find ourselves in daily struggle that turn us into, well, human, and also assholes.
You know? Those unfunny dull bits of life that are characteristically devoid of drama? Im sure you get those as well in your life.
But, at the same time, if you asked someone: so what happens in Seinfeld (this awesome show you keep bugging me and others about), well they go to the restaurant and … nothing.
It’s a show, about NOTHING.
There is nothing to understand. It’s not exactly a deep and complex series, and everything you just wrote can be understood by anyone with half a braincell and enough attention to watch one episode.
It just. Isn’t. Funny.
Not in the least bit funny at all.
Isn’t universally funny.
Stop polluting up all our shit. Fuck you.
bit rude innit, not much I can do on my own :(
If you’re talking about the climate, it’s not just us. But we sure excel as sucking don’t we?
All of your sitcoms are crap. The same recycled gags over and over. Unpleasant people who hate each other snarking, saying “oh my god” and then explaining their jokes.
I saw something like 15 or 20 years ago saying the average “adult” (not in a sexual way) show is designed for 14 year old viewers. Our media has made so much more sense to me since then.
This sounds pretty accurate! When I was enjoying sitcoms, i was in my teens. Where the +30yo crowd barely could relate.
I kinda liked them as a teenager. Semi as much nowadays.
Huh…
Why do you think Americans gave up on cable? It wasn’t because of sports, we still love those and go through way too many dogshit streaming services to watch them. Our shows are so trash even we don’t wanna watch them.
Then the laugh track tells you to know it was funny
Dead people laughing to a brain dead audience
Oh, we know. These aren’t exactly made for deep intellectual discovery. It’s trash TV for the lowest common denominator. It’s like saying Mr Blobby shows how goofy UK television is.
That most of the world would be better off with the collapse of US hegemony.
To some Americans, it is that the US isn’t the pinnacle of democracy but far from it. To others, that the EU isn’t better policy wise than the US, it just has far more competing interests which mean lobbyists have to hand out more than a lump sum of sucking up to people. To some Americans, that your health care system is really shit, to others, that their public health care is increasingly under attack in some EU countries by an industry pouching and locking down medicine through the profits their greed has allowed them to accumulate in countries like the US to such an extent that there are real tradeoffs now to the for-profit alternative.
Ok, so I’m going to do one that’s actually likely to be downvoted by the Americans here.
Sometimes censorship is necessary for a safer society.
You should delete your comment if you truly believe in it.
Huh?
This is an actually good one, speaking as an American. I disagree with you, and that makes this a good answer to the question posed in this thread. I disagree with you because to understand why America can’t have nice things, you need to imagine what it would look like if the Republicans were in charge of implementing them (because they basically are, and have been more or less unchallenged since Reagan). So, no, I’m not in favor of censorship, because what we’d get is censorship a la Republican, where you’re free to use the N-word, but criticizing the government, CEOs, Wall Street, or Jesus will get you sent straight to jail.
Censorship of what exactly? Certain things I’d understand, but there are alot of things that could be censored that wouldn’t be so great
Hate speech is a good start. Go about the place saying “Muslims rape children” or “F-slurs make us lose wars” and you are actively making life more dangerous for people.
Hate speech is not protected by the constitution and is typically a point of proof in hate crime cases. There are also civil remedies for directed hate speech in many states. Also assault is a crime that only involves words.
We allow generalized hate speech because we believe that the appropriate counter to speech is speech.
“If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” - Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Hate speech is not protected by the constitution
That is 100% false. Hate speech is absolutely protected speech. The only speech that is subject to criminal penalties is speech that incites people to immediate violence, and obscenity (e.g., child pornography). I’m not going to cite all the case law, but this is a good starting point
We allow generalized hate speech because we believe that the appropriate counter to speech is speech.
In the world of corporate mass media where money is a microphone, unfortunately this belief is just idealist faith. Overall, good ideas and speech alone hasn’t prevailed, and harmful speech has done more than counter-speech could hope to fix.
Then who should be the one deciding what gets censored and how?
Good question. It’s especially a tough one in the real world, where the people who have the power to censor are typically the ones who shouldn’t have it.
I personally don’t think there are any hard-and-fast definitions of what should be censored and what shouldn’t. It depends heavily on content and context. There’s a big difference between, hypothetically, a historian discussing Nazi ideology in a research paper, and between a politician discussing it in the presidential debate. One of those has legitimate value to society, the other is anti-social, politically delusional and harmful to citizens. Same with some forms of climate denialism - there is a valid point in permitting counterviews to consensus in the scientific method, but there is also a point where mass media is outright lying for the sake of self-enrichment at the expense of the entire planet’s population.
who should be the one deciding
One aspect of this is that communities often decide, to some degree, what is acceptable to say through social mores. This obviously isn’t foolproof and can be manipulated, but tends to be better than having just one person at the head of a network deciding.
It is a tough question, because everyone has biases. You shouldn’t have any one person or group in control of this.
That all said, my comment was meant more meant as a critique of the environment, where the owning class (that is, the ruling class) own and control the vast majority of the mass media and social media platforms. The worldview I’ve seen around which suggests their speech is comparable to the speech of you and me is naive. That’s a big part of why nonsense is now common sense, because the ruling class and their propaganda can pervade society despite so much of it being either illogical misinformation or outright bullshit.
Strong disagree, but, you know, this is about things Americans aren’t ready to hear.
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with a country that decides modern online privacy laws based off of 1980s video rentals, any sort of restriction on free speech WILL be manipulated into whatever the people in power agrees with.
Problem is that well-intentioned rules with discretionary boundaries end up with unethical enforcement. See: the bill a few months ago that federally defines “anti-semitism” as including “criticism of the state of Israel”. Actually that’s not even a discretionary boundary, that’s statutory. The reasoning behind the First Amendment in the first place was to avoid authoritarian censorship, including these kinds of games where “reasonable regulation” of speech is used to shoehorn in authoritarian censorship.
We had a decades long problem with Muslim grooming gangs in the UK and this kind of attitude was what prevented the authorities from intervening for so long. In some cases actively covering up the existence of the gangs or casting aspersions on the victims. Estimates of the number of victims are in the hundreds, possibly thousands.
Every day we get another horrifying new detail about historical abuse and in some places these gangs are still active.
“Muslims rape kids” is wrong, bigoted, and a gross generalisation. However if there is a pattern of certain abuser profiles then the general public needs to be informed.
“Muslims rape kids” is wrong, bigoted, and a gross generalisation.
Yes. That’s why it’s an example being used. It’s not how you inform the general public of real atrocities, and the important kernels of truth behind that wrong, bigoted and gross generalisation don’t justify making it. So I don’t understand why you felt compelled to detail them.
It’s weird how America is pretty divided on this. Like we believe in consequences?
So you can absolutely yell Fire in a movie theater and get a lawsuit. Or you can scream “Bomb” in an airport and get tackled.
Yet on the phone, some lady said “Delay, deny, depose” and suddenly, she’s a terrorist.
We “believe” you should have the power to say anything.
Yet that’s a lie and Americans still believe in it.
Anybody on this platform already knows all the problems and how it can be better. Anyone preaching here hoping an American will read it and change are just wasting keystrokes.
We know it’s bad. Unfortunately there’s not much anyone of us here can do besides bitch and moan, or else we wouldn’t be on Reddit Ultra.
That being said, German McDonald’s have chicken wings and they’re pretty amazing.
USA McDonalds is one of the worst in the world AFAIK. Actually, that goes for many of their products, from the butyric acid in Hershey’s to the HFCS in their world-famous drinks (which I assume is why ‘mexican cola’ is such a meme in the US due to their cane sugar). The Fanta in Italy actually tastes like good oranges, because they just wouldn’t be able to compete with the garbage they sell in many other countries.
Is it true German McDonald’s sells beer?
German McDonald’s doesn’t sell beer, but the McDonalds in Spain or Portugal do (can’t remember which one it was).
But yeah, when I (as a German) went to a US McDonalds it was by far the worst one I’ve ever seen.
Never saw those in our local McD options.
But tbf I am not checking it anyway.Accurate!
As an American, there isn’t a single thing I read here that I disagreed with.
But are people expecting change? Like you hate American sitcoms… Bro so do I! You hate how much we take over world politics. Like dude I know, sorry man!
But continue sharing. It’s nice to get some opinions and bring us down a peg.
Americans invented neither the car not the computer.
Nor the television (Scottish). Nor the radio (Canadian and Italian).
I would credit Carl Benz (a German) with inventing the car, unless you consider the steam-powered vehicles built by the French to be cars.
Thanks for the clarification :)
But we did invent Steve Jobs and Henry Ford. So we’ll take the credit.
In foreign countries, the people don’t always speak English or “American” and shouldn’t be expected to bow down to you.
(Me trying to speak in their language)
Them: I speak English.
Me: oh okay. :-(
Where was that?
Most of Northern Europe (Netherlands and Denmark are especially bad)
That makes sense. Western and Southern Europe are definitely different
Every country I’ve traveled to.
Japan and Korea were all smiles while asking me to go English. Very patient.
Some Germans saw me as a way to practice their English, which was funny.
France, I avoided tourist cities and they still had a look of annoyance with my broken French.
Thailand/China was probably the most “stop, just speak English”.
The real problem was they were trying to speak French in Spain and Spanish in Italy. Common mistake, happens all the time.
